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#1. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Forget GTA III and Hot Coffee, forget Postal 2, forget Jack Thompson. The gaming related conflict of the decade was simply the one between those who wanted the Space World 2000-looking Link and those who preferred the cel-shaded Wind Waker Link. As imperfect as the general structure of Wind Waker may have been (far too few temples, too much sailing and shard fishing), the parts that were included were just right. Z-targeting had been perfected, the temples were well-designed, clever and as difficult as you’d want them to be.

An expanded Wind Waker set in more favorable terrain and with fewer dull moments was planned, and poised to top A Link to the Past as the best and most thorough Zelda game of all time. Alas, it was not to be. The traditionalists won, the flagship future of the franchise belonged again to the “realistic” wing (relegating Wind Waker style to snoozefests) and no further Zelda game has even come close to the best Wind Waker moments. What could have been…

#2. Portal

It takes something special to lure me into anything that looks like a first person shooter. From experience, I plainly suck at them, and there’s been precious little in any of them to motivate getting over the necessary speed bump into mastering the control scheme. But that’s not the interesting angle. The interesting angle is that a school team put together a remarkable game based on an innovative idea, were hired for it, developed another remarkable game based on the same innovative idea and completely mopped the floor with the rest of the industry.

It wasn’t just the novelty of the idea, it was that it made for such a good game. It wasn’t just that the game was short, it was that the difficulty was so well balanced and improved in reasonable steps. It wasn’t just that the game was well packaged, it was that, for a game who had only one speaking role and an anonymous first person, the character provided guidance, atmosphere and an antagonist, to say nothing of the set pieces.

Now you’re thinking with portals.

#3. And Yet It Moves/Braid

Braid and And Yet It Moves are both based, fundamentally, on the same principle: what if we took the 2D platformer that has been established, made and remade so many times, and we add one more set piece that changes everything?

And Yet It Moves has drawn the short straw: it is not at all as widely spread and commands none of Braid’s name recognition. But I think its twist is the most interesting: jump and rotate the world around you. Combine this with some inspired level design and an artistic style that will go down in the history books and you’re onto something big.

That’s not to say that Braid is bad, quite the opposite. But some of its time-control-based puzzles are a little too arcane, a little too inhumanly impossible unless you put in the prerequisite afternoons to not only plot the course of action but actually perform it.

The two are eminently playable but also deeply complementary. Whereas Braid has one of the best twists I’ve seen in a game, And Yet It Moves has very little to show in the story department. And whereas you can spend weeks setting records on the individual courses in And Yet It Moves, there’s often just one way to solve a particular Braid puzzle. All I can say is that I am much happier having played and finished both.

#4. Mega Man 9

After years of the industry re-release trend, it seemed only fitting that someone should do what we’ve always asked for and made a new game based on the great ideas that made the original good. This is not the same as just making a sequel, for a sequel is more often than not unnecessarily involved and expanded. The Mega Man lineup proves this point more eloquently than anything else: more than twenty games in several new irrelevant series, none as good as any of the originals. There’s a reason people have been asking for Mega Man 9 for years.

Mega Man 9 is a NES game through and through, and it stands on equal footing with any of the original Mega Man NES games in any axis you want to measure, including sprite flickering, if that’s what you’re into. The level design is classic and the whole game is deliciously challenging, and I don’t mean “it takes time to find all achievements” (which it does, I assume) but “it takes blood, toil, tears and sweat to play through the fucking game in the first place”. As much as it is a pain that it was ever realistic that Capcom (or really Inti Creates) would mess this up, it is a relief that they didn’t.

Now with Mega Man 9 fulfilled, and Mega Man 10 announced, we shall drift from one pipe dream to another: that the things that made Mega Man 9 successful shall be universally applied instead of being boxed into their own genre, contained like so much nuclear waste, free to ignore.

#5. New Super Mario Bros. Wii

Mega Man 9 segues nicely into New Super Mario Bros. Wii. While Mega Man 9 was the complete nostalgia package, along with old school graphics and authenticity, New Super Mario Bros. Wii displays what magic can happen when you embrace the same spirit but lose the historical baggage. Some may say “why continue to make Mario games?” and they may have a point. I say “well, if you’re going to continue making Mario games, at least making them like this makes for terrific Mario games”.

If New Super Mario Bros. Wii is Nintendo’s way of making up for Mario is Missing, Super Mario Advance, Mario Party and Paper Mario, apology accepted. Just don’t let it happen again.

Honorary Mentions (Special Thanks)

• New Super Mario Bros. [DS]
• Super Mario Galaxy [Wii]
• Worms [iPhone]
• Super Monkey Ball 2 [GC]
• TimeSplitters II [GC]

#6. Rolando/Soosiz

Rolando was the first deserving blockbuster iPhone hit and handily compensated for its gimmicky controls. Soosiz brings a seemingly simple, cuddly platformer but makes a formidable opponent and proves that a limited, well-designed set of on-screen controls can work, lack of tactility be damned. I cannot forecast to you where touch gaming will be in ten years, but my hopes are accordingly set.

Good Riddance

• Worms 3D
• BMX XXX
• The Sims
• Banjo-Tooie
• Super Mario Advance
• Stupid fucking mini-games
• Super Mario 64 DS
• Every single war game featuring burly men with rocket launchers, and every single magazine repetitive enough to choose them on their cover issue after issue after issue
• Physical media

It occurred to me that I had not written this prediction down.

So Apple has now, quite a while ago, tossed their port of ZFS to the dogs, apparently over licensing concerns. I’ll admit that I was readily interested in every benefit that having ZFS would bring: the ability for file snapshots, an easily expandable file system across disks without the noose of partitioning. I thought ZFS was the quickest way to get there, because file systems take time to develop and stabilize. You don’t want a shaky file system. (It now seems that alternate, less revolutionary file systems can bring many of the same benefits, are farther along in development and are owned by Steve’s yacht-owning best buddy.)

But the thing that every single Apple web site has had collective boners about has been Time Machine. I regard this as part of the same narrow mindset that lead everyone to call the pre-iPhone iPhone “the iPod phone”, and sketch it up as a big screen with an on-screen Clickwheel. (Awesome, you combined the worst aspects of both approaches! I can so not tell you’re just tossing things together in Photoshop!) This is not about Time Machine, but it may very well be that the closest thing we have to it right now is Time Machine.

Here’s what’s going to happen in the future someday:

• Apple will adopt a file system (maybe even, but probably not, a variant of HFS+) with copy-on-write semantics. (Which is better for SSDs in any situation.)
• They will also adopt some way of marking a file write (or bunch of file writes) as “a new version”.
• There will be a way of toggling whether you care about versioning globally and overrides a bit deeper (maybe per volume, maybe per user, hopefully per folder).
• You can go to that file and choose to view old versions or to diff them.
• Every now and again, old versions will be cleared out to backup media or a new sort of server to save room.
• Very probably, during idle time, consecutive changes will be retrofit into an incremental form such that chunks that are identical aren’t stored twice, saving space and time. This might even happen immediately when the size of the file to save is big enough that copying everything will go slower than this analysis. The fastest will be the default for any given situation.

Nothing here involves Time Machine more than indirectly. Time Capsule may play a part as the server, but this functionality will be a lot closer to Get Info and Quick Look than Time Machine.

Lazy versions of grep/where and map/select — stick a fork in it, it’s LINQ. There’s more, though, like the ability to gather+take/yield from deeper in the call stack (you can, you know, call out to other methods, because there are no horribly complicated state machines generated; it’s just horribly complicated at runtime instead).

Before I started diving into Perl 6 again, I didn’t actually remember a lot of the good stuff of not being compiled and therefore not being as strict. Those features of Perl 6 are not so much lax at checking as they are making things possible in the first place. C#’s policy of always knowing wouldn’t have you passing around type subsets at any time, and it definitely wouldn’t have made parsing so fucking sweet. And let’s not forget its horribly antiqued notion of a switch statement, which sole innovations are being able to do it on string literals and allowing implicit fall-through only where it’s obviously intended (stacked cases with no interleaving code).

You know what bugs me about what, if I had no taste at all, I would call “slidergate“, which is the curious case of Adobe’s pervasive nuggets of shitty UI as gleefully and repeatedly pointed out?

It’s that, like every other company except very, very few, Adobe seems okay with trying to simultaneously assert that a) they listen to customers and the opinions play a big role in the development of their applications, b) they’re not going to fix it right now because fixing is hard and involves people doing their job in UI design and people doing their job in Quality Assurance and c) it Really Fucking Stings when people level these claims.

Please, Adobe: your fly is open. You do not argue about whether there’s any reason perhaps maybe for it to be open. You do not argue about whether Apple’s or Microsoft’s flies are open, or whether Macromedia had their fly open when you acquired them, or whether there’s a long standing tradition of flies being open, or that you have big things to accomplish and can’t be expected to constantly inspect whether your fly is open. You don’t even argue that, relative to this time a few years ago, the frequency with which your fly has been open has decreased but no one ever notices.

Just zip your fucking fly. I promise you that it’ll take a lot less time than you’ve spent defending its current position.